'Cinemeducation' as a teaching–learning tool in Community Medicine for Phase II MBBS students

Background: Many public health topics in the subject of Community Medicine have a psycho sociocultural aspect to them, and these are taught by traditional methods like didactic lectures with little or no interaction of faculty and students. This limits the comprehensive understanding of the students regarding sensitive issues. There is a felt need to improve the knowledge and understanding of many of these competencies among students through available cinema movies addressing these concepts. Objectives: 1. To assess effectiveness of “Cinemeducation” as a tool to teach identified competencies in Community Medicine subject. 2. To assess perception of students for “Cinemeducation” to enhance learning and communication skills. Methodology: Study Design: Nonrandomized intervention study. Setting: Department of Community Medicine, Government Medical College, Pali, Rajasthan. Participants: Year 2 from 2020 Batch. Sample Size: 159 students. Sampling: Complete enumeration. Intervention: All 159 students were divided into two groups and alternately shown movies, Toilet–Ek Prem Katha, Padman, Outbreak, and Steel Magnolias, or exposed to didactic lecture and were assessed using pre- and post-tests and student satisfaction and self-confidence in learning scale. Results: The post-test scores of cinemeducation showed an improvement by a mean of 1.88 ± 0.7 points. The self-confidence and learning scale showed that 86% of students agreed that cinemeducation was better than didactic lectures. The mean satisfaction index of cinemeducation as a teaching–learning method was 97.6. Three out of the four movies addressed the competency well, and the difference between the pre- and post-test scores was statistically significant following cinemeducation as compared to lectures. Conclusions: As the student correlates real-life situations in movies like Toilet–Ek Prem Katha, Outbreak, and Padman, they definitely understood the topic better with cognitive scores showing an increase.